REFUTING ARGUMENTS AGAINST ABORTION
- Julia Hess
- Nov 21, 2022
- 4 min read
Terry Gross
In response to bills proposed in our session and in Congress in general, I’ve decided to analyze and refute the primary arguments against federally legal access to abortion. I aim to present why abortion access in the United States is a nonpartisan issue and why arguments against abortion are fundamentally flawed, based on legal and medical arguments.
If I’ve missed a relevant argument that you’d like to discuss or if you’d like to challenge me on any of these arguments, contact me at jhess9@lion.lmu.edu.
1) ARGUMENT: Gender equality is achieved not by access to abortion but by resources for women to be successful as mothers.
COUNTERARGUMENT: Increasing resources for mothers means increasing resources for everyone. For instance, greater access to healthcare is something that would benefit everyone. More accessible and less expensive childcare would require a structural and legislative change in the U.S.’s economic priorities. The argument that these wholesale changes are the answer is naively utopic and does not help the women who are currently seeking abortions as a result of the resources they lack. A woman who lacks resources when she is pregnant will not happen upon those resources in a matter of nine months. Let’s revisit this argument when maternal healthcare and childcare are reliable and affordable, when the minimum wage is liveable, and when paid maternity is the law. Until then, don’t tell women that they’re not trying hard enough to survive.
2) Abortion can damage the long-term health, physical and emotional, of women.
So can:
Pregnancy.
Labor.
C-section.
Stillbirth.
Raising a child who is born with a serious disorder.
The inability to financially support a child.
Losing a loved-one to a pregnancy they were forced to follow to term.
A homemade or underground abortion.
The familial and cultural shame that single mothers suffer.
Birthing the child of one’s rapist.
A foreseen and preventable death from childbirth.
For nearly all women, abortion is a last resort. It goes against the biological imperative of procreation, which means that the decision is not only individually heartbreaking but evolutionarily counterproductive. Talk to any mother and they will tell you that bearing a child affected them physically during their pregnancy, during labor, and for years afterward. Ask any woman who aborted a child if it wasn’t the hardest decision she ever made and if she didn’t have sleepless nights contemplating the decision. Then ask her why she followed through with the abortion. The answer might be that the pain of birthing and rearing a child would have been even greater.
3) Abortion is murder, and murder is both illegal and immoral.
Murder, by definition, is unjustified. It is the killing of another human without provocation and without a physical threat directed at the murderer. A study conducted by UC-Boulder found that, if abortion was banned nationwide in the United States, there would be a 21% increase in pregnancy-related deaths. We can reasonably take this to mean that one in five legal abortions prevents the patient’s pregnancy-related death. In the case of abortion patients for whom childbirth would be lethal, it is clear that there is no legal parallel to murder. The termination of the pregnancy would be both legally and medically justified.
What about those abortions which aren’t motivated by the physical health of the prospective mother? There are two primary perspectives we can consult: medicine and the law. The medical opinion is that human life, in any meaningful sense, is defined by a functioning brain. It is also important to note that the brain’s physical existence is not the same as a brain functioning. After six weeks of pregnancy, the brain of the fetus begins to physically develop, but it is not developed enough to function. This medical opinion informs the legal one, which is that murder is the killing of another person. A fetus without the normal functions of a human brain is not a person. Thus, an abortion (up until a time in the pregnancy that is determined case-by-case) is not murder.
4) Any arguments against abortion based on religion, specifically Catholicism in the U.S.:
Religious arguments are irrelevant to United States law. The Establishment and Free Exercise clauses of the First Amendment prohibit the U.S. government from (1) establishing any religion within the law and (2) restricting religious practice so long as it does not harm the freedoms of another.
In the case of abortion, then, the law cannot (1) employ any legal arguments based on religion or (2) require any person to undergo an abortion if doing so is against their religion. Notice that, if access to abortion is codified as U.S. law, neither of these clauses is violated. The government cannot recognize these religious arguments in its decisions about the law, and it is actually impossible to argue for or against them because they are based on faith and belief. It’s a mistake to confuse the principles of personal or cultural morality for the rule of law. The law also cannot, however, require anyone to get an abortion if her beliefs prohibit it. There is currently no law, enacted or proposed, that would do so. Therefore, codifying abortion access into federal law does not violate any religious freedom.
5) The problem of unwanted pregnancies is solved through increased sex education and access to birth control.
Based on CDC research, it hasn’t, and it won’t. Access to sex education, mostly in K-12 schools, has been increasing for decades, to the benefit of young people. The yearly rates of abortions among women ages 15 to 44 continues to fluctuate. There was a general decrease in the number of abortions in the 2010s (2010-2019), yet the number increased by 2% in 2018-2019. It’s likely that increased sex education and access to contraception has decreased the need for abortion, but those methods do not eliminate the need across the board, nor do they have any bearing on the cases in which a mother faces death or in which the fetus is found to have a serious medical condition. In addition, while the number of abortions is slowly decreasing, the need is everpresent, and these methods will never completely eliminate the need for access.
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